Inquiries into history and outsider status spark a striking sampling of recent graphic literature. Nick Abadzis's homage to the first dog in space is largely traditional in its blend of image and word. Similarly, Ann Marie Fleming's reconstruction of the story of her great-grandfather, Rutu Modan's edgy walk along the personal-political border, and Adrian Tomine's finely drawn analysis of young, overintellectualized love hew to lesser and greater degrees of relative conventionality. A history of Students for a Democratic Society resembles author Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" series in its deadpan realism but transcends the expected by virtue of its many voices. Laurence Hyde's offering is a replica of a 1951 "novel of the South Seas" told in wood engravings. It is a stunning narrative in which the visuals, some tortured but all transcendent, do all the talking necessary.
Total recall
With drawings and text, these graphic novels conjure vivid moments in public and personal history
"Laika" (First Second, 205 pp., paperback, $17.95) is the tale of the Moscow street mutt that served as the first guinea pig of space travel. Strapped into Sputnik II, which the Communists launched 50 years ago to herald the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Laika died of stress and overheating after mere hours in space. By braiding and embellishing her story and those of chief Sputnik II designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev and Yelena Dubrosky, the nurse who came to be Laika's chief caretaker, Abadzis conjures the complex, scary period known as the Cold War. His colors are vivid, his pages dense - most are 12 frames deep though varied in verbosity - and his line is vigorous, if not detailed. Verve and variety, not finesse, are his watchwords. So is the emotional genuineness that makes this kind treatment of an iconic dog so strong.
"The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam: An Illustrated Memoir'' (Riverhead, 170 pp., paperback, $14) is a "graphicization" of a 2003 documentary film the talented Canadian Fleming made about her great-grandfather, a magician and acrobat who toured internationally in the first half of the 20th century. Told in drawings, photographs, and words, it's quite unlike other graphic novels in its dynamism (fan the tiny figures at the bottom of each page fast; they're like contemporary flipbooks and the Fleer Funnies that used to wrap chunks of Dubble Bubble gum). In tracking Sam from his origins in China to his success in the United States and Europe, it links Fleming to her hybrid roots; she was born in Okinawa of Chinese and Australian parentage. Long Tack Sam's life, though it had its ups and downs, is convincingly magical; it also embodied issues of race, commerce, and creativity that still dog us.